Notorious Nineteen (4 page)

“Boy, that’s hardball,” Lula said.

“I wouldn’t want you to do without pineapple upside-down cake,” Grandma said. “I guess I shouldn’t snoop for you. I gotta go to the hairdresser anyway. There’s going to be a big viewing tomorrow night for Stanley Kuberski, and I want to look good. The paper said the Elks will be holding a ceremony for him, and there’s a couple hot Elks I got my eye on.”

“You should go with your grandmother,” my mother said. “Loretta Gross’s boy, Cameron, is an Elk. I bet he’ll be there, and he just got a divorce.”

“Is he hot?” Grandma asked. “I might be interested in him.”

“He’s too young for you,” my mother said.

My father shoveled in potatoes. “
Everyone
is too young for her.”

“I’m aiming for young,” Grandma said. “When I go out with someone old they die before I can reel them in. Besides, I’ve been told I don’t look my age.”

It’s true that Grandma doesn’t look her age. She looks about ninety.

It was a little after eight o’clock when Lula and I left my parents’ house. Lula drove off in her red Firebird, and I drove off in Big Blue. I had a bag of leftovers on the seat beside me, and I was at a crossroads. I could take the leftovers home, or I could drive the short distance to Morelli’s house and share. Sharing seemed like the way to go since I was going to beg off our Friday night date.

Joe Morelli inherited a house from his Aunt Rose. It’s just outside the Burg boundary, on a quiet street in a blue-collar neighborhood much like the Burg. It’s a small two-story row house that is a comfortable mix of Morelli and his aunt. Her old-fashioned curtains still hang on the windows, but most of the furniture belongs to Morelli and his shaggy red-haired dog Bob. Bob is part Golden Retriever and part Wookiee. He eats everything, loves everyone, and mellows out Morelli.

I parked in front of Morelli’s house, went to the door, and let myself in. “Hey!” I yelled. “I’ve got food. Anybody home?”

Bob gave a
woof
from the kitchen at the back of the house and I heard him gallop toward me. He came at me full speed, put his front paws on my chest, and knocked me flat on my back. He ripped the food bag out of my hand and galloped off.

Morelli sauntered over from the living room and helped me up. “Are you okay?”

“I was bringing you fried chicken, but Bob knocked me down and took the bag of food.”

“Damn,” Morelli said. “He can’t have chicken bones. He hacks them up in the middle of the night.”

Morelli left me to track down Bob, there was a lot of yelling and growling from the vicinity of the kitchen, and Morelli returned to the living room with the bag of food, a fork, and two beers. He wrapped an arm around my neck, pulled me into him, and kissed me.

“The Mets are up by two runs,” he said. “What’s going on with you?”

I sat next to him on the couch and took a beer. “I had to borrow Big Blue, so I had dinner with my parents.”

“Something wrong with your car?”

“It accidentally got blown up.”

Morelli turned and focused on me. “Car bomb?”

“Hand-held rocket.”

The line of his mouth tightened a little, and his eyes narrowed ever so slightly. “It was an
accident
?”

“I was on Stark Street.”

“That explains it,” Morelli said, his attention back to the bag of food.

He ate the chocolate cake first. He gave some potatoes to Bob. And he put the rest in the fridge for later.

“This is a nice surprise,” he said, settling back into the couch. “Do you want to take your clothes off?”

“Whatever happened to romance? What about foreplay?”

“Foreplay goes faster without clothes.”

“Fast is important?”

Morelli flicked his eyes back to the television. “They’re changing the pitcher. We probably have ten minutes.”

“I need more than ten minutes.”

Morelli grinned at me, and his eyes got soft and dark. “I know.”

“And I get distracted by television.”

He remoted the television off. “Yeah, I know that too.”

“What happens after ten minutes and the new pitcher’s ready to go?”

“Fireworks. And then you tell me I’m amazing.”

“Suppose there aren’t fireworks after ten minutes?”

“I’m no quitter,” Morelli said.

I knew this to be true. “I think I’m getting in the mood,” I said to him. “And I can see you’re already a couple steps ahead of me.”

“You noticed.”

“Hard not to.”

He nuzzled my neck, popped the snap at the top of my jeans, and slid the zipper down. “Let me help you catch up.”

FOUR

MORELLI IS ALWAYS
fully awake at the crack of dawn, ready to go out and enforce the law or, if I’m in his bed, to grab a quickie while I’m still half asleep. I opened an eye and saw that he was moving around in the dimly lit room. He was clean-shaven, his hair was still damp from his shower, and he was dressed in slacks and a blue dress shirt.

“Is this dress-up Friday?” I asked him.

“I have court.” He took his watch off the nightstand and slipped it on. “I’ll probably be there most of the morning.”

I looked under the covers. I was naked. “Did we have sex this morning?”

“Yeah. You thanked me after and said it was great.”

“You’re fibbing. I never thank you.”

I got out of bed and dropped one of Morelli’s T-shirts over my head. I shuffled after him, down the stairs and into the kitchen.

Morelli’s kitchen is small but cozy. He’s laid new tile on the floor, put in a new countertop, and repainted the cabinets and walls. His appliances aren’t new but they’re newer than mine. His refrigerator is usually filled with food. His cereal doesn’t have bugs in it. And he has a toaster. This all puts him light-years ahead of me in the domestic goddess race.

A door opens off the kitchen onto Morelli’s narrow backyard. He’s had it fenced in for Bob, and Bob was impatiently waiting to get let out to tinkle. Morelli opened the door, and Bob bolted out into the darkness.

“You never get up this early,” Morelli said, closing the door, pushing the
BREW
button on the coffeemaker. “What’s going on?”

“I was hoping you knew something about Geoffrey Cubbin.”

“The guy who disappeared from Central Hospital? I don’t know much. It’s not my case.”

“How could someone just walk away in the middle of the night without anyone seeing him?”

“I’m told it happens,” Morelli said. “And he had good reason to want to walk away. He didn’t have a promising future.”

“Who has the case?”

“Lenny Schmidt.”

“Did he check to see if Cubbin called a cab?”

Morelli did a palms-up. He didn’t know. “I assume you’re looking for Cubbin because Vinnie wrote the bond.”

I dropped two slices of bread into the toaster. “It’s a high bond, and I could use the money. I need a new car.”

“You always need a new car. What you really need is a new job.”

I got two mugs out of his over-the-counter cabinet and put them on the little kitchen dining table. “Which brings me to the other issue. I’m going to have to cancel our date tonight. I told Ranger I’d do security for him at a party. He needed a woman.”

“I bet,” Morelli said.

“It’s
security
at a
party
.”

“I don’t like you working with him. He’s not normal. And he looks at you like you’re lunch.”

“You look at me like that too.”

“Cupcake, you
are
my lunch.” Morelli filled the mugs with coffee and spread strawberry jelly on his piece of toast. “Call me if you get done with the party early. If I run into Schmidt I’ll ask about the cab, but I doubt Schmidt’s done much to find Cubbin. Schmidt’s got a full caseload, and at this point Cubbin is more your problem than his.” He looked at the black T-shirt I was wearing. It hung about six inches below my doo-dah. “Do you have anything under that shirt?”

“You could peek and find out.”

“Tempting, but I’m late for my morning meeting.”

“Then I guess you’ll never know.”

Morelli lifted the hem of the shirt, looked under, and smiled. “I’m in love.”

“What about your meeting?”

“I might make some of it if I use my flashers and run the lights.”

Connie and Lula were already at the office when I rolled in. The door to Vinnie’s lair was open, and I could smell cigar smoke.

“Is that her?” Vinnie yelled.

There was the sound of a chair scraping back, and Vinnie charged out, the cigar clamped between his teeth. Vinnie is slightly taller than me and looks like a weasel. His dark hair is slicked back, his eyes are crafty, his pants are too tight, and his shoes are too pointy. He has an affinity for pain inflicted by women wielding cuffs and paddles, and he’s been rumored to enjoy intimate relationships with barnyard animals. He’s married to a perfectly nice woman named Lucille, who for reasons I’ll never understand has chosen to endure the marriage. And last but not least, probably because he’s such a loser himself, Vincent Plum has a good understanding of the criminal mind, and that makes him an excellent bail bondsman.

“Where is he?” Vinnie asked me.

“Where’s who?”

“That asshole Cubbin. Who else? You got him nailed down, right?”

“Not exactly.”

Vinnie had his hands in the air. “What not exactly? What does that mean?”

“It means I don’t know where he is.”

“You’re killing me,” Vinnie said. “If this agency tanks, it’s all your fault. It’s on your head. Fatso over there will have to go back to the streets. And Connie’ll be doing wet work.”

“Excuse me?” Lula said. “Fatso? Did I hear you call me Fatso? Because you better tell me I heard wrong on account of I might have to beat the crap out of you if I heard right.”

Vinnie clamped down tighter on his cigar and growled. “Just
find
him,” he said to me. And he retreated into his office and slammed the door shut.

“Get a grip,” I yelled at him. “He’s not even officially FTA until Monday.”

“We’ve got donuts,” Connie said, pointing to a box on her desk. “Help yourself.”

“I’m going to talk to Cubbin’s wife,” I said to Connie. “And then I’m going to take a look at the nursing home. Maybe you could make some phone calls for me and find out if he took a cab somewhere when he checked out of the hospital.”

Lula was on her feet, her head swiveled around trying to check out her ass. “That’s the second person told me I was fat this week. I don’t feel fat. I just feel like I got a lot of all the good stuff. What do you think?” she asked Connie and me. “Do you think I’m fat?”

“Well, you’re not
thin
,” Connie said.

“Some of me’s thin,” Lula said. “I got thin legs. I got Angelina Jolie ankles.”

Connie and I looked at her ankles. Not fat. Possibly Angelina quality.

“It’s just between my armpits and my hoo-ha that I’m better than most ladies,” Lula said. “I got stuff a man could hang on to. That’s one of the reasons I was so good as a ’ho.”

“As long as you’re healthy,” I said to her. “You’re healthy, right?”

“Yeah, I feel great. And one of these days I’m gonna go get myself checked out to take a look at my cholesterol, my sugar, and my blood pressure.”

Connie took the box of donuts off her desk and threw it into her wastebasket.

“So now what?” Lula asked. “We going to see Mrs. Cubbin?”

I had Cubbin’s file open to his bond sheet. He looked worried in the photo, or maybe he was squinting in the sun.

“He lives in Hamilton Township, by the high school,” I said.

“We could sneak around and look in his windows and see if he’s hanging out in his undies, watching television and popping painkillers,” Lula said.

Twenty minutes later Lula and I pulled up to Cubbin’s house. It was a modest white ranch with black shutters and a forest green front door. A white Camry was parked in the driveway leading to the attached garage. Very Middle America.

“Which one of us is going to do the sneaking around, and which one the doorbell ringing?” Lula asked.

“I’m ringing the doorbell,” I told her. “You can do whatever you want.”

I walked to the small front porch, rang the bell, and Lula skirted the side of the house. The front door opened, and a woman looked out at me.

“What?” she said.

She had fried blond hair, an extra forty pounds on her small frame, a cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth, and a spray tan that had turned a toxic shade of orange.

“Mrs. Susan Cubbin?”

“Unfortunately.”

“You don’t like being Mrs. Cubbin?”

“For eight years I’ve been married to a man with a two-inch penis and one nut. The loser finally grows balls and steals five million dollars, and I can’t get my hands on it.” She took a long pull on her cigarette and squinted at me through the smoke haze. “And?”

I introduced myself, showed her my semi-fake badge, and gave her my card.

“Bounty hunter,” she said. “So I’m going to help you why?”

“For starters, this house was put up as insurance against the bond.”

“Like I care. It’s got mold in the basement, the roof’s falling apart, and the water heater is leaking. The mortgage is killing me, and the bank won’t take it back. I can’t even get this disaster foreclosed. I don’t want the house. I want the friggin’ money. I want to get my stomach stapled.”

“Have you seen your husband or heard from him since he left the hospital?”

“No. He didn’t even have the decency to tell me not to come pick him up to go home.”

“Has anyone heard from him?”

“Not that I know about.”

“Did he withdraw any money from your bank account?”

“Do I look like someone who has money in the bank?”

“Most people who skip at least take clothes, but your husband disappeared with just the clothes he wore when he checked in to the hospital.”

“He’s got five million dollars stashed somewhere. The jerk can buy new clothes.”

“Do you have any idea where he might have gone?”

“If I knew where he went, I’d be there, and I’d choke him until he coughed up the money.”

“Cranberry Manor would be grateful.”